Deadly Danger Dungeon – SCANNED

James / May 5th, 2010

I finally got around to scanning the board game Deadly Danger Dungeon as seen on the Board James episode. I had to scan it in pieces and reassemble it in photoshop, so please excuse the choppiness. Not to mention, I made this game as a child. It’s far from perfect.

Print it out if you can make it large enough. Play it. Make flash games about it. Whatever. Have fun.

INSTRUCTIONS:

You’re a hapless stick figure who had the bad luck of stepping into a hole. But this is no ordinary hole. It leads to Deadly Danger Dungeon. No one has EVER escaped!

DICE / GAME PIECES – Use one die. Two Dice if you want it to be Deadly Danger Dungeon Turbo. I don’t know if it’ll make it any easier. 1 or more players. Be creative with your game pieces. You can use coins, mario toys, rabbit turds, whatever works.

HIT POINTS (HP) – Start with 3 Hit Points. You can raise the amount depending on how difficult you want it to be. If you land on a space with a trap (Examples: Falling a short distance, getting hit by boulders, arrows) you will lose one Hit Point. If you land on a space with a potion, add 2 hit points. NOTHING can save you from landing on a space which says “Game Over”. (Examples: falling into spike pits, crocodile pits, volcanic fires, or high drops.)

GAMEPLAY – Begin at the START point. Start by by moving right. You can choose to be an asshole and not tell your friends. If they go left, they will eventually find out that they need the Key. (You can’t pass the space near the top that says “Need Key” without the key)

Get the KEY first, then get the MAGIC TALISMAN. Then go for the final climb, to the exit at the upper right corner. (You can’t pass the space that says “Need Talisman” without the Magic Talisman.)

Door 1 leads to Door 2 and vise versa. Door 3 leads to Door 4.

At the bottom left, there’s a pit. Fall in there and you’re screwed. You have to move to the right and touch the “BORDER” before you can go left and climb your way back out. Trust me, it sucks.

And that should be all there is to it. Experiment with it and change the rules as you like. If anyone can actually beat it, then congratulations!

Oh and by the way, NEW BOARD JAMES – TUESDAY, MAY 11

Comments

Wow I remember the episode where you reviewed this and it looks like a dick to try to complete. I wish I had a big enough printer but I don’t. 🙁
Great news to hear there is always something new coming out. Keep up the great work.

Rabbit turds? Really now? And just where do you supposed I get these rabbit turds? It’s not like I have a rabbit on hand or can go down to the store and buy a fresh bag of rabbit turds. Do you have rabbit turds, James? If so, how much are you charging for these “Rabbit Turds”? lol!

This game is ridiculous! I’d rather stand in front of a high powered fan while someone dropped fresh dog turds into the spinning blades. I’d rather do butterfly’s in a pool full of diarrhea and vomit. I’d rather lick a dog’s asshole after it shits (as opposed to it licking its own asshole). And last but not least, I’d rather have 300 Spartans ram their swords into my ass to relieve the pain of having to play this game. This game is ridiculous!

I bet someone with enough time on their hands could figure out the probability of winning the game based on statistical odds of each successive roll landing on the scarce safe spots. It’s probably incredibly low, like less than 1/10,000 hahahaha

bacondude1985: If there were a finite number of states, solving this game would be a simple matter of building a matrix representing the probability of reaching each state from each other state, and computing its eigenvector for 1. However, there are infinite states, because there is no bound on how high your HP can go (suppose you’ve got the key, you get the potion between the two deadly falls (+2 HP), you fall from the place 3 squares right of the start (-1 HP), you get the potion again (+2 HP), you fall again (-1 HP), you get the potion again (+2 HP)…)

James, could you tell us the actual physical dimensions of the game? We could expand it to actual size and print it using Rasterbator (http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/). Rasterbator takes images, blows them up and splits them into 8.5×11 in sections, which you then print and join back together. Perhaps it would be better though for someone to expand the file using photoshop or some other tool, because using Rasterbator to expand might pixelate it too much.

fuck you, james as a child. will some math genius calculate the probability of winning this game? i suspect that it is less than winning the lottery while having every one of your electrons appear on the moon.

“will some math genius calculate the probability of winning this game?”

Well I’m hardly a math genius, but I am a geek about statistics so I was able to do a rough estimate. If you’re interested in the math then read up, if you just want to know the odds of winning then just skip to the end of this comment.

The way I figure it, each lethal “Game Over” space represents roughly a 1 in 4 chance of death each time you pass over it. This seems counterintuitive at first since there are six sides to a die, but the reason it’s 1 in 4 and not 1 in 6 is because you might have multiple opportunities to fall in the same pit: Say you’re 4 spaces away from a Game Over pit, and you roll a 2. Well sure, you didn’t roll a 4 so you’re not dead yet, but if you roll another 2 on the next roll, you’re still a goner. The math for how I calculated these odds are long and complicated, but take my word for it: each “Game Over” tile is a 1 in 4 chance of death. (The actual chance of death for each lethal space is 25.36%, but I’ll be generous to the game and round down a bit.)

Also keep in mind, for the purposes of calculating the odds, I disregarded all the non-lethal falls, injuries, and potions… basically I ignored the HP aspect of the game altogether, since the instant death spaces are so frequent that the odds of running out of HP are statistically negligible. Basically James wasted his time putting all that stuff in the game in the first place.

Now then, following the path of the game from beginning to end, I counted 20 instant-death spaces from start to finish. Some of these are the same space that you have to pass over twice (or sometimes three times), but each “pass” over a death space was counted as an independent opportunity to be horribly killed. And although you can fall through floors and bypass some of the Game Over spaces, it’s equally possible to fall and need to repeat sections, so statistically I’m going to assume that those cancel each other out — on an average playthrough, you will probably encounter 20 deadly pits.

So, what we have are 20 independent events, and a 75% chance of surviving each one. This comes to 0.75^20, or…

A 0.317% chance of winning. Which means, if you played Deadly Danger Dungeon 1,000 times in a row, you would win THREE times. Not quite lottery odds, but definitely way, way past the “complete waste of fucking time” threshold.

Hmm, although now that I’ve actually played the thing through the link Chris posted above, maybe the odds of running out of HP isn’t as insignificant as I thought. I didn’t consider the possibility of falling in that bottom left corner over and over. Now we really do need a math genius to figure this out, since each fall is not independent of one another — one fall could send you backwards and cause you to fall again in the same spot.

@anthonysapien,kevincogneto Theoretical probability will not work here. It’s just too complicated. What we need is a computer program that plays the game over and over again. Fortunately, I am a computer geek with experience in C++, so I will try to cook up something.

Isn’t it a lot easier to survive if you go back and forth in spaces? You can choose to go left or right in the beginning, so it stands to reason that you can go either way with any movement.
Like, if you roll a 2, but there’s a gameover tile 2 spaces away, you could go forward one, and back one space. That doesn’t seem like it’s against the rules or anything. I’m not saying this’ll increase your chances astronomically, but at least you can stop falling in a pit just cause you’re close to it. This style of play would probably make high rolls way better, which I feel would be more enjoyable, even though you’ll probably die every game anyway.
You might be able to figure out a way to have a guaranteed win with this style though.

I know this is like the third one, but my girlfriend and I spend the better part of yesterday making our own version. If anyone’s interested, I have one that’s super-high-res(22 inches tall in 300 DPI res, so you could print it out board game size) and I’ve come up with some rules that are of course optional but make the game winnable and competitive.

I waited for soo long for this game to get scanned that I swear to god I actually just drew out my own Version of this game onto cardboard, I tried it out on most of my freinds and they all got major pissed off, my version is only just a bit smaller than James version but it is pretty much the same, but great game, I tried to make an original game that was almost as hard as this and came close but I could never beat the challenge of the classic known as deadly danger dungeon.

Fuck is this game a bitch! By some miracle I was ping-ponged between the bottom pit and getting across it 3 times w/ getting the potion multiple times and not dieing. I even got past the first set of spiked pits, climbed back up to the start, got through door 1 too 2… but got dumped in the fucking fire..! I’ll be doing a review of this in the future, should be funny.